A Survey on Various Word Spotting Techniques for Content Based Document Image Retrieval

Searching documents for information and retrieval of relevant documents is a basic activity. Various tools are readily available for searching and retrieval from digital documents, but not much robust methods are available for retrieval from historic documents and old manuscripts as they are not digitized but available in scanned formats. Conventional way of retrieval from scanned document images is using OCR but not all scripts can be OCRed robustly. An inventive approach to search these document images and retrieve relevant results is using keyword spotting or simply word spotting which gives better results as well is less complex than OCR. This paper discusses the different available word spotting techniques for document images. Keywords— Word spotting, document image retrieval, keyword spotting, searching and retrieval, word image.